The Life of the Body-Heart-Mind-Spirit:
Cross-Cultural Reflections on Cura Personalis
Bret W. Davis
Nachbahr Award Talk
October 2, 2015
I feel truly honored to receive the Nachbahr Award from my home institution, Loyola
University Maryland, and to be associated with the legacy of Bernhard Nachbahr, a former
professor of philosophy about whom so many have spoken so highly. I am grateful not only for
the award but also for this opportunity to speak to my esteemed administrators and colleagues,
and most of all to many of our brightest students and to their parents—who are probably fairly
bright themselves.
It is the custom for Nachbahr Award recipients to speak on a topic related to “the life of the
mind.” There are many pleasures and duties in life, but at a university such as Loyola we enjoy
the privilege and we assume the responsibility of dedicating ourselves to what is traditionally
called “the life of the mind.” I am a philosophy professor, and this phrase well describes much
of what I do and what I try to model for and share with my students.
Philosophy doesn’t aim to teach one how best to navigate the rat race so that one can quickly
collect the most cheese; if such instrumental know-how is all one is interested in, one should
probably go to a trade school rather than a liberal arts university like Loyola where students are
required to think about more intangible and maybe even impractical things, such as the meaning
of life. Philosophy deals with the big questions—but, to be frank, philosophy often doesn’t
answer our questions so much as it questions our answers. It makes us wonder about things
we’ve taken for granted. Indeed, one of the main jobs of a philosopher is to be what Socrates
called a “gadfly,” that is, a pesky insect that stings us so as to wake us up from our dogmatic
slumbers and urge us ever onward towards a greater realization of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Today, it is in the spirit of such a philosophical gadfly that I want not only to applaud but
also to critically reflect on what we mean by “the life of the mind,” this motto that even we
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philosophers usually take for granted. Specifically, as the title of my talk suggests, I want to
advance a more holistic view of education.
Modern academic philosophers have tended to forget that philosophy was for the ancient
Greeks, not just an intellectual exercise, but a transformative way of life, a life-changing pursuit
of wisdom. For ancient philosophers such as the Stoics, it explicitly involved the training of
one’s embodied emotions as well as one’s intellectual mind, and it was meant to lead ultimately
to a spiritual liberation or what in the Middle Ages came to be called the salvation of one’s soul.
We moderns, by contrast, have largely consigned the training of the body to the gym, the shaping
of emotions to the home and to mass media, and the salvation of the soul to religious institutions.
This narrowing of philosophy to the life of the mind, segregated from the lives of the body,
heart, and spirit, was in fact foreshadowed in ancient Greece, in particular in Plato’s view that
the human psyche consists of a hierarchy of three parts—a desiring body, a passionate heart, and
an intellectual mind—and that philosophy is a “practice of dying,” that is to say, a practice of
separating the intellect from the body. Christian Platonists such as St. Augustine added to the
top of this psychological hierarchy the immortal soul. I cannot here, without getting in over my
head, attempt to wade into and weigh in on the theological debates over whether salvation in
Christianity should be understood in Platonic terms of a “separation of the soul from body” or in
Biblical terms of a “resurrection of the body,” and if these views are somehow compatible.
In any case, as Pierre Hadot suggests, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola can
be seen as taking up, or taking over, the lineage of ancient Greek conceptions of philosophy as a
transformative and liberating way of life. When in the Enlightenment philosophers declared
their independence from theology, they left, as it were, such spiritual exercises with the churches
and increasingly restricted the practice of philosophy to an intellectual pursuit of knowledge
rather than a more holistic and therapeutic pursuit of wisdom. The poor body, often disdained
for its sinful desires and distrusted for its deceptive senses, has frequently been viewed in the
philosophical as well as religious traditions of the West as a nuisance rather than as a vehicle for
intellectual and spiritual pursuits.
Matters are very different in other cultures and traditions. My own intellectual and spiritual
quest led me to Japan, where I lived for 13 years, commuting between the activities of a student
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and lecturer at various universities on the one hand, and the practice of Zen Buddhism at temples
and monasteries on the other. Along with their importation of Western culture and its
institutions such as the university, the modern Japanese have in part also imported our
segregation of body, heart, mind, and spirit. Fortunately, a more integrated approach to
education has been preserved in its temples and monasteries, an approach that can fruitfully
supplement, as well as be supplemented by, the life of the mind cultivated to a very high degree
at modern Western-style universities.
In East Asia, when one refers to the “mind,” the word or sinograph they use—pronounced
xīn in Chinese and either shin or kokoro in Japanese—in fact means both “heart” and “mind.”
They speak not of the heart or the mind, but of the unitary heart-mind. That is to say, they do not
tend to make the linguistic, conceptual, and experiential split that we, in the West, have made
between the seat of the intellect (the mind) on the one hand and the seat of the emotions (the
heart) on the other. Moreover, as with our word “heart,” their word denotes the locus of one’s
feelings and spiritual center as well as the physical organ that keeps one’s life-blood circulating.
Hence, in a single word, they refer to the core of the self as a holistic body-heart-mind-spirit.
In the modern West, especially in the US, many have tended to separate the life of faith from
the life of the mind, a separation that has given rise to a perceived antagonistic relationship
between religion and science, and to the kind of fundamentalistic fideism that Pope John Paul II
warned against in Fides et Ratio. The Dalai Lama and others have claimed that the core
teachings of Buddhism are compatible with modern science. Whether or not that is the case, in
Buddhism faith and reason are supplemented and mediated by holistic practices, especially
practices of meditation. It is said that one enters the stream of Buddhism by means of faith, that
is, by means of trust in the teachings, but crosses it only by means of practice. In other words, it
is not enough just to believe; one must exercise the whole body-heart-mind-spirit in order to
realize the truth for oneself. Enlightenment in the East is an integrated, rather than a merely
cerebral, realization; it entails not just an insight into, but also an embodiment of truth.
The practice of Zen is accordingly said to require the “whole body and spirit” (zenshinzenrei). Dōgen, a thirteenth-century Zen master, spoke of the need to engage in both the practice
of the body and the practice of the mind (shinjin gakudō). Yet for him these two forms of
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practice ultimately converge in the realization of what he calls “the oneness of the body-mind”
(shinjin-ichinyo). It is not that Dōgen did not recognize any distinction between mind and body,
but he thought that the ideal is not, as Plato suggested, to separate the one from the other, but
rather to harmoniously reintegrate them.
In East Asian traditions such as Zen Buddhism, education is thus thought of in holistic terms
of cultivating the body-heart-mind-spirit. In the modern West, however, as a result of our history
of splitting up the self into body, heart, mind, and spirit, our lives have become
compartmentalized. Usually institutions, and often individuals themselves, attend mainly only to
one or the other parts of the self. A sports gym and the athletes who train there attend to the
body; a university classroom and the students who study there attend to the mind; and a church
and its congregation attend to the heart and spirit. But does not the athlete also have a mind, a
heart, and a spirit? Does not the student also have a body, a heart, and a spirit? And does not the
church-goer also have a body and a mind? When we are feeling unwell, we may go to a medical
doctor who looks at the body, to a psychologist who speaks with us about our minds and hearts,
and/or to a priest or spiritual teacher who counsels us about our hearts and souls. But no one
seems to be sure just how these different forms of treatment and different aspects of the self
relate to one another.
There have been, of course, exceptions and resistances to this fracturing of the self in the
West. For instance, upon entering Loyola’s Fitness and Aquatic Center, one is immediately
confronted with the following quotation from Saint Ignatius: “A proper concern about the
preservation of one’s health and bodily strength for the divine service is praise worthy and all
should exercise it.” Now, I am not sure how many of us think of our workouts at the gym as a
spiritual as well as a physical exercise. Nonetheless I do think that a holistic approach to
education is quite explicitly called for by the pedagogical principle that informs the life of a
Jesuit university: cura personalis, care for the whole person. Taking care of the body, taking
care of the heart, taking care of the mind, and taking care of the spirit; each of these is surely
vital to the cultivation of the whole person.
How well do we integrate these modes of taking care of the self? Do we too not tend to
compartmentalize our lives? A student may go to class to take care of the intellect, to the gym to
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train the body, to the Counseling Center to address issues of the heart, and to Alumni Chapel to
attend to matters of the spirit; but at the end of the day she or he may be left wondering how to
relate these activities to one another. Even so, I do think that students at Loyola are given many
opportunities to reintegrate the life of the body-heart-mind-spirit. Certainly a literature class
engages the heart along with the mind, and an art class gets the body involved as well. A holistic
pedagogy is explicitly implemented in our service-learning classes. The students on the servicelearning path of my Asian Thought class, for example, physically, mentally, and emotionally
engage in and reflect on community service in light of the teachings and practices of Hinduism
and Buddhism. The other experiential option offered in this class is the meditation path; those
students not only read about and intellectually reflect on the role meditation plays in Hindu and
Buddhist traditions, they also experiment with the practices themselves by participating in The
Heart of Zen Meditation Group which I lead here on campus. Our Messina “living learning”
program is yet another important vehicle at Loyola for connecting the classroom to the dorm
room.
I have so far been criticizing the fracturing and compartmentalization of our lives, and
stressing the importance of reintegrating the body-heart-mind-spirit of our selves. Yet, without
retracting or retreating from anything I have said, I want to end my talk by acknowledging that,
nevertheless, there is an important sense in which it is proper for a university to remain primarily,
even though not exclusively, focused on the life of the mind. Just as a gym is properly focused
on training the body, and a church is properly focused on cultivating the heart and soul, a
university should indeed be focused primarily on the free exercise of the intellect. It is important
that even institutions of higher learning that are guided by a clear and confident religious mission
remain welcoming spaces for open-minded and unbiased critical inquiry. Whereas secular
universities might be criticized for excluding or ignoring matters of the heart and spirit,
universities with religious affiliations must be careful not to dogmatically restrict the myriad
ways in which such matters can be connected with intellectual pursuits. The ideal university, in
my view, not only maintains a primary focus on the life of the mind, but also supports the
cultivation of a diversity of individual and communal avenues for reintegrating the whole person.
In my experience, Loyola University Maryland approximates this ideal as well as does any
existing university. Let me leave you with a concrete image that symbolizes how a university
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can—even while maintaining a primary focus on the life of the mind—at the same time have as
its unobtrusive center an open place crisscrossed by various pathways of integration: the Quad.
(Admittedly, this is more of a grassy than a concrete image.) On one end of our Quad stand
Alumni Chapel and Campus Ministry, with its interfaith as well as Catholic programs. At the
other end stands the Humanities Building, which houses a Counseling Center and the Center for
Community Service and Justice, as well as, side by side on the ground floor, the pious Theology
and pesky Philosophy Departments. On all sides stand classroom buildings in which the various
arts and sciences and other academic disciplines, including of course business and management,
are studied. Branching out, on the way to the library can be found a beautiful Japanese style
meditation chapel, and up Charles Street a state of the art fitness center. Left and right are
dormitories in which to sleep and cafeterias in which to eat. Yet in the middle of all this is the
Quad, an open space traversed by the pathways on which we commute between these
interconnected places in our ongoing individual and collective endeavors to educate and integrate
the whole body-heart-mind-spirit.
Thank you very much for giving me your undivided attention!
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